How “The Angel” helped 15,000 people steal broadband

And how he got three years in jail.

In 2006, a hacker going by the name "DerEngel" ("The Angel") wrote a book for respected tech publishers No Starch Press on Hacking the Cable Modem. The book came with a warning: "The practice of modifying a cable modem violates service agreements, and hackers risk being banned by service providers for life. This book is not intended to be used for stealing Internet service or any other illegal activity." It was intended, you know, for research. Not for stealing Internet access.

An early review of the book noted this warning didn't seem to fit with the tone of the text, which repeatedly implied "that uncapping, MAC [Media Access Control] cloning, and evading detection is a noble pursuit." (Though one section did include "recommendations to ISP engineers on how to improve their systems to more easily defeat and detect cable modem hackers.")

The feds weren't buying the "research" angle, either; they were convinced that DerEngel was running the country's largest cable modem hacking operation, showing thousands of people around the country how to get free or higher-speed service from local Internet providers. And they were going to stop it.

Hacking modems

Harris' book on cable modem hacking

DerEngel was really Ryan Harris, a young Oregon resident. Harris had dropped out of high school at 15, like many disenfranchised geeks. He got his GED instead and attended college for a year, but his computer hacking skills were largely self-taught. Around 2003, he set up TCNiSO.net, a Web-based company devoted to creating "diagnostic" tools for cable modems.

The tools came in two basic varieties: a packet sniffer dubbed "CoaxThief" and a MAC address/config file changer for select cable modems. Together, the tools enabled some fairly clever Internet fraud.

To understand how it worked, consider how cable modems function. Cable networks generally use a shared line connecting many homes in a single neighborhood, as opposed to DSL, where each home's line runs all the way back to a central phone office. That posed a problem for cable operators when they began offering Internet access: how do you tell which traffic on the wire is being paid for by customers, and how do you limit them to their subscribed speed tier?

The basic mechanism involved MAC controls. Each cable modem had a unique MAC address linked to a subscriber's account, so the cable headend could simply block all traffic that didn't originate from a MAC address linked to a paid-up account. Problem solved!

But not completely, because computers are notoriously flexible. Intrepid hackers quickly figured out tricks to rewrite their MAC addresses, using ones associated with paying customers. Bam—free Internet.

Of course, there was a hitch. Cable companies, though widely loathed, are not in fact staffed only with zombified morons. They had a further limitation in place on local lines: two identical MAC addresses couldn't exist on a single neighborhood segment, to prevent exactly this sort of fraud.

So the hackers had to get social. Using tools like CoaxThief, they could sniff their local cable lines for the MAC addresses of other users, but they couldn't use the addresses themselves. Instead, they went online—to forums like those on TCNiSO.net—and they swapped with others who had done the same thing. Now the two hackers involved in the swap had a MAC address that came from outside their neighborhood. They just had to get it into the modem, which was designed to prevent such tampering.

That's where Harris's other software came in. Released in 2003, the Sigma firmware exploited modem vulnerabilities to install itself into a modem's memory, allowing users to change the device's MAC addresses. The code had to stay continuously up-to-date, since cable companies regularly tweaked their own countermeasures in response. In 2005, for instance, Sigma became SigmaX and gained the ability to defeat cable-company initiated "probes" of cable modems on their lines.

Despite the nature of his business, Harris was concerned about the piracy of his software. A 2006 version of his site warned that "all of the software found on this page is property of TCNiSO, INC" and said that it could not "be distributed or linked to, without the written consent of TCNiSO."

With the right MAC address and the right software, suddenly the hacked cable modem provided a connection to the cable system. And it could get even faster. Cable modems use cable-provided profiles to limit users to specific speed tiers; Harris also found ways to uncap the modems by altering these profiles, upping their speeds dramatically.

Despite the talk about "diagnostic purposes," the TCNiSO.net operation doesn't come across as a particularly subtle operation. Harris employed several people around the country to code his apps and firmware, and he oversaw a forum in which people offered troubleshooting advice on stealing Internet service and on exchanging MAC addresses. (One thread in 2006 was called "What i need to do, so my isp can't catch me." Others offered "the Charter 0/0 config for download," while another asked: "RR [RoadRuner] in North Carolina, anyone want to trade macs?") An FBI agent had no trouble calling the phone number for TCNiSO and ordering a hacked modem.

127 Reader Comments

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak also might have gone to jail for the Blue boxes they built to allow the user free telephone calls. They sold about 150 Blue Boxes they built. They even called the Vatican to try to talk to the Pope at one point... and for free...

"With the right MAC address and the right software, suddenly the hacked cable modem provided a connection to the cable system. And it could get even faster. Cable modems use cable-provided profiles to limit users to specific speed tiers; Harris also found ways to uncap the modems by altering these profiles, upping their speeds dramatically."

I would really like this explained further. Is this more evidence that ISPs are creating a bandwidth scarcity?

"With the right MAC address and the right software, suddenly the hacked cable modem provided a connection to the cable system. And it could get even faster. Cable modems use cable-provided profiles to limit users to specific speed tiers; Harris also found ways to uncap the modems by altering these profiles, upping their speeds dramatically."

I would really like this explained further. Is this more evidence that ISPs are creating a bandwidth scarcity?

not really, more like that the cable isp's are using the cheap quick and easy way to enforce the limits of the subscription you pay for.

they could also do it at the ISP end but the HW needed for that are much more expensive than just configuring the modem to limit.

Its time we turn this idea of the "internet" on its head and create an "outernet": an ipv6 based, peer routed network where all a user has to do is put up an antenna to join. All traffic routes through nearest neighbors or, through packet encapsulation over legacy ipv4 routes until deployment saturation is achieved. It would be slow at first but it would be OURS. No pesky corporate owned proprietary routing infrastructure to mess with! And it turns the idea of LAN nodes isolated from the WAN by firewalls exactly on its head: a network of TOTAL CONNECTIVITY with direct routes to all neighboring nodes as the fundamental networking paradigm, without neglecting to firewall critical services as needed. *THIS* is the future of the internet.

There are a few mesh network projects that are already approaching this idea as well, such as The Free Network Foundation, and Peerpoint. I've written more or less a whitepaper on the subject in this thread http://freenetworkfoundation.org/?page_ ... -outernet/ but I am hardly the first or the only one to suggest this as a critical structural and technological upgrade to preserve a free and open internet.

Also, FWIW, for those looking for the status page on their cablemodems, many cablemodems have a status page at 192.168.100.1 . Most consumer routers will route from the LAN to that address no problem.

Have fun with the FCC dude. Better stay within the exact bandwidth and power limits, because when you cause interference (and this kind of massive RF saturation will), you'll be getting the crap sued out of you and fined like you wouldn't believe.

I've pretty much given up. My life belongs to the mega corporations and my goal is to join them at the top 1% (the bottom 1% of the top 1%) in oppressing the rest of the 99%.

Bourgeois and proletariat? You know maybe those had a place back in the day, but that's not really the way the world works anymore. We have something called a "middle class" now.

What middle class?

flashoverride wrote:

It's a lot more poorly defined than it used to be, but it's the place where most people actually fall on the economic scale.

It's defined as "the poor" and only used as newspeak to describe the majority by the modern robber barons.

flashoverride wrote:

That 99%/1% crap is a false dichotomy and not really useful for anything. In any system, with any attribute, you will always have the top 1% (intelligence, athletic ability, cup stacking) and anyone who falls under that gets lumped into the bottom 99%. It's not a valid comparison or worldview.

The entirely relevant 1% being described here controls the majority of resources while the rest, which (if my elementary math serves, let's see, um, carry the 1...) is 99%, lives on subsistence wages i.e. the crumbs. Trickle down (my leg) indeed.

Wow. I don't know whether to respond to you, sob for the next generation, troll your post, or what. Let me say that your frame of reference is lacking.

99% of people in the US do not live on "subsistence" wages. If you are addressing the rest of the world, then you might have more of a point outside of the "developed" countries (the G20-ish).

I get it, hyperbole is awesome. I've been known to engage it from time to time as well. In fact, hyperbole + relative anonymity is super freakin sweet (THE BESTEST THING EVA!!). But that doesn't make it an accurate reflection of reality.

Are there income disparities? Sure. Is the system "fair"? Eh, probably not as much as it could be, but it's fairer than a lot of human history, and trending in the right direction over the long term. Could taxing and spending be handled better? Of course it could, and we'll have that debate now and continue to have it as we have for the past 200 some odd years. Could corporations be "better"? That's kind of a wishy-washy concept with a poorly defined target, but sure why not we'll go for it.

On holding an internet subscriber responsible for traffic from an IP address:

How am I supposed to secure my internet access when it can potentially be hacked on the networks outside of my own home, which are explicitly, legally off-limits to me?

Cable modem hacking is a prime example of why we cannot allow an assigned IP address to be used as an identifier of a person, or even an internet account. From cable modems and Wifi routers on the user end, to the millions of nameless networking devices that comprise the internet at large, ALL ARE SOFTWARE BASED DEVICES POTENTIALLY VULNERABLE TO HACKING. This leaves me, an individual internet subscriber, ultimately vulnerable to the security of millions of other devices over which I have no jurisdiction or control. And even of the devices in my own residence, I can be liable at law for flawed firmware that may be barred from access, even assuming I have the technical skill to ensure it's invulnerability to outside hacking.

I note with grave concern that the UK has recently begun the process in law to hold subscribers liable for misuse of their internet connections, as identified by IP address. They offer warnings to users, such as to make sure you set a strong Wifi password. This shit is getting real, and Big Media is pushing to bring it to a country near you.

We need to fight for clear legal recognition that the internet, as currently provisioned, cannot be secured such as to guarantee the security or identity of people using it, and as such, that machine addresses cannot be considered a reliable way to identify people.

That $7.50 a month just to lease their crappy cable modem irks me. They are always nickel and dime-ing their customers. Maybe I need to buy my own cable modem ;P

Yeah if you're getting charged $7.50 a month to lease a cable modem, that's highway robbery. Then again, as is the DVR fee, $10/month, combined with the fee for the DVR itself, another $10/month. Just makes us all hate cable companies and their overcharging.

When I was with Charter in St. Louis, I had to fight yearly (each time I renewed my contract) to have them remove the modem rental fee because I had my own. It was the most tiring argument I've ever had to have repeatedly. And even then, I'd still watch my monthly bills like a hawk to make sure they didn't slip it back on there (because twice I caught them doing so the instant I stopped paying attention). So I'm sure that doesn't qualify as a scam in any sense. (/sarcasm)

Now that I've moved to an area that has only one carrier, and it's a tribal-owned DSL company, I took my father's old DSL modem that he no longer uses (because of course my old cable one won't work). They came over to hook me up, and I gave them my modem and they looked at me like I was an idiot. They refused to use it, I *had* to use their particular one. Meaning I'm stuck with the monthly rental fee and cannot fight it at all, PLUS their jerk techs who set it up locked our router name and didn't give me the administrative password so that I could change any settings. So--despite my utter disgust for all things networking--I'm stuck with whatever scraps my DSL company "so generously" offers me and I have to pay whatever they require because I live in the middle of the desert on an Indian reservation and there are absolutely no other options, period. Even satellite won't come out here. It's pathetic.

So sorry about that rant, but I find it oh so hard to feel sympathy for the government and ISPs when people like this commit crimes against them. If they weren't such soul-sucking evil tyrants to begin with, perhaps the common man wouldn't have such apathetic attitudes toward screwing them over.

I even called into their internal technical support thanks to a very friendly and understanding customer service rep... He may be in trouble for specifically encouraging certain actions that would be illegal in practice, but the fact that hacking your modem for full configuration access should not be any more illegal than putting DDWRT or Tomato on your router.

What's illegal about spoofing a MAC address? As others have suggested this probably violates the TOS with your ISP... but illegal? I'm curious what actual charges this dude was found guilty of.

I think it would be pretty easy to convince a jury that it's theft of service. The fact that he did it by cloning the MAC address is almost beside the point, the intention was to steal service.

But he didn't steal service. Granted his customers did.

Is it illegal to sell lock picks? No, it is not. It's illegal to use them to gain unauthorized access.

The problem is the monopoly of ISP's, IMO. I just dont get it. These are government backed monopolies, monopolies that could only exist through the direct intervention of the government. In other words, if there were no government regulations on ISP's, there wouldnt end up being only one (or maybe two if you are super lucky) ISP's to choose from, regardless of where you live.

And with tangible evidence of that being on this very website (South Carolina's Anti-Municipal crap), its difficult not to sympathies with this guy. This is the same system that protects software patents, colludes with foreign connections to attack non-citizens (both abstract and concrete), and cater to the corporations' every whim. Something is terribly wrong...

Its time we turn this idea of the "internet" on its head and create an "outernet": an ipv6 based, peer routed network where all a user has to do is put up an antenna to join. All traffic routes through nearest neighbors or, through packet encapsulation over legacy ipv4 routes until deployment saturation is achieved. It would be slow at first but it would be OURS. No pesky corporate owned proprietary routing infrastructure to mess with! And it turns the idea of LAN nodes isolated from the WAN by firewalls exactly on its head: a network of TOTAL CONNECTIVITY with direct routes to all neighboring nodes as the fundamental networking paradigm, without neglecting to firewall critical services as needed. *THIS* is the future of the internet.

There are a few mesh network projects that are already approaching this idea as well, such as The Free Network Foundation, and Peerpoint. I've written more or less a whitepaper on the subject in this thread http://freenetworkfoundation.org/?page_ ... -outernet/ but I am hardly the first or the only one to suggest this as a critical structural and technological upgrade to preserve a free and open internet.

Also, FWIW, for those looking for the status page on their cablemodems, many cablemodems have a status page at 192.168.100.1 . Most consumer routers will route from the LAN to that address no problem.

Have fun with the FCC dude. Better stay within the exact bandwidth and power limits, because when you cause interference (and this kind of massive RF saturation will), you'll be getting the crap sued out of you and fined like you wouldn't believe.

Actually your statement is fairly ridiculous as nowhere have I suggested using anything but standard fcc approved 802.11 radio hardware.

But were we to consider baby steps into other frequency allocations one need only look at all the various frequencies of operation offered by vendors like ubiquiti at http://www.ubnt.com and others to see how many devices are already fcc approved, available, deployed and operating on radio spectra besides 2.4 ghz and 5 ghz: 900mhz. 700mhz. 4.5ghz municipal. 3.5ghz ISM. 180mhz utility companies. 400mhz licensed bands from other vendors.

When people start updating the firmware en masse on preexisting hardware to support the ipv6 protocol stack with a few extensions, enhancements and conventions, there wont be any lawsuits and certainly not directed at me or any of the other myriad developers working hard to create feasible and workable mesh routed radio networking technology.

I dont see anything in this story that actually shows that anything was done wrong. The layout of the story goes out of its way to base events for the ''ideal of vendetta'',then shelters a premise that ''big business Internet" has every convenience in "sentencing lengths".

What I see is that the server monopoly for business and internet is at its exact fortitude. May be,that there is that choice to shelter it as fact or fiction. Being that a business itself will have to be less than presumptious about the structure that creates themselves as successful. Then when,the question becomes,is it "i'll just burn a few users - who has client machines",and therefore "we can live for a while in the fire" that creates. ....

You would have to have some pretty sophisticated database,and server technology,to actually extol some of the intelect (not the - intelectual ., ahum property) of what is gained from some users conversive references. But you know that, when there is egg shells to walk on , as in munchkin cookies (in the millions).,. And in one way,or the other way - casualty or confeddi, there is either work,or money or both to be made.

Mean "Do you think trading blows with a coo-coo clock is easy " ? Im just saying. Build a boat,make a sitcom. A lot of sophistication to creation of scripts,in both sorted 'ways'. Supported,or not supported, decided,or not decided.

Best I can do is anologize. Im sure you dont envy me. But some of this premise is lack of it - .. well the structure of your article (Nate ) is not the usual as it most of the time is. Still I can't say what your debunking. I dont have the power to see what needs to be.

Just seems as if the site is phished or something. Noticed that my dictionary does not have a definition for 'moon 3'. A reflected sight that is a false pretension of the real projection of an image'.or idea originally created. Don't like moons like this that much. Every body uses them. Guess there is money to be made some where.

The structure of this story is a cliff hanger. Guess its your shirt to make. Different from oragomi,but hey. May be you can sypathize that structure is useful. And can be creative.

""The government concurred, arguing in its trial brief that it could show "Harris benefited in an intangible way from his users' success because he was able to satisfy a long-held personal vendetta against cable companies."""

Since when is it a crime, or even a consideration, to benefit from a personal vendetta? Conspiracy to commit a crime is only when you're actually doing something, not just sitting there thinking hateful thoughts. His intangible benefit is heresay and even were he to admit it, again it isn't a crime.

That $7.50 a month just to lease their crappy cable modem irks me. They are always nickel and dime-ing their customers. Maybe I need to buy my own cable modem ;P

The sooner the better.

I got my own after almost a year of constant outages from a bad modem, they offered me I think it was 6 months of free service after I forced them to replace it, and the outages stopped dead.

I recently rejoined cable's broadband, and they heavily urged my to replace my old stable Motorola. I read the reviews on the models that they sell, and everyone has problems with them. They never seem to learn.

Its time we turn this idea of the "internet" on its head and create an "outernet": an ipv6 based, peer routed network where all a user has to do is put up an antenna to join. All traffic routes through nearest neighbors or, through packet encapsulation over legacy ipv4 routes until deployment saturation is achieved. It would be slow at first but it would be OURS. No pesky corporate owned proprietary routing infrastructure to mess with! And it turns the idea of LAN nodes isolated from the WAN by firewalls exactly on its head: a network of TOTAL CONNECTIVITY with direct routes to all neighboring nodes as the fundamental networking paradigm, without neglecting to firewall critical services as needed. *THIS* is the future of the internet.

There are a few mesh network projects that are already approaching this idea as well, such as The Free Network Foundation, and Peerpoint. I've written more or less a whitepaper on the subject in this thread http://freenetworkfoundation.org/?page_ ... -outernet/ but I am hardly the first or the only one to suggest this as a critical structural and technological upgrade to preserve a free and open internet.

Also, FWIW, for those looking for the status page on their cablemodems, many cablemodems have a status page at 192.168.100.1 . Most consumer routers will route from the LAN to that address no problem.

Actually your statement is fairly ridiculous as nowhere have I suggested using anything but standard fcc approved 802.11 radio hardware.

But were we to consider baby steps into other frequency allocations one need only look at all the various frequencies of operation offered by vendors like ubiquiti at http://www.ubnt.com and others to see how many devices are already fcc approved, available, deployed and operating on radio spectra besides 2.4 ghz and 5 ghz: 900mhz. 700mhz. 4.5ghz municipal. 3.5ghz ISM. 180mhz utility companies. 400mhz licensed bands from other vendors.

When people start updating the firmware en masse on preexisting hardware to support the ipv6 protocol stack with a few extensions, enhancements and conventions, there wont be any lawsuits and certainly not directed at me or any of the other myriad developers working hard to create feasible and workable mesh routed radio networking technology.

What there will be, is relief and celebration.

I was working on something like this a few years ago. For long point to point links we came up with a "shutter" to encode using a lazer. (concept since blue light lazers were very expensive back then) Since we have 802.11n dual mode now we don't need two sets of cards one in 5GHz for local, and next hop links. It was a fun project, it reminds me of the packet radio networks I read about before I got into university. Sadly not only will it be slow, it'll be finicky as well, and you'll almost never know why. Lots of things effect that frequency, least of which being the client radios themselves. The longest ranging of the avaliable bands also being the most utilized. What we need is something like wi-max for next hop links, and leave 5GHz for the security conscious.

Irony here is that this is how cable started to begin with. They connected a few good antennas up, and shared the black wire around the neighborhood. Now everyone wants to put up our own antennas again, and get off the black wire that is not really shared anymore. In some other nations they were doing this with cat5, and sharing it with the neighbors.

Irony here is that this is how cable started to begin with. They connected a few good antennas up, and shared the black wire around the neighborhood. Now everyone wants to put up our own antennas again, and get off the black wire that is not really shared anymore. In some other nations they were doing this with cat5, and sharing it with the neighbors.

Irony here is that this is how cable started to begin with. They connected a few good antennas up, and shared the black wire around the neighborhood. Now everyone wants to put up our own antennas again, and get off the black wire that is not really shared anymore. In some other nations they were doing this with cat5, and sharing it with the neighbors.

I heard this started in europe, but that was way before wiki. So absent anything better than "stories" I heard, or read I yeild to your example. I did hear it as shared around a neighborhood freely when it started.

"Since new television licenses were not being issued, the only way the demand was met, even in communities with one or more operating broadcast stations, was by Community Antenna Television (CATV), as early cable was known (so named because of the literal sharing of a very large receiving antenna by an entire community)."

from your link

This might be the source of what became the story I heard when I was younger.

""The government concurred, arguing in its trial brief that it could show "Harris benefited in an intangible way from his users' success because he was able to satisfy a long-held personal vendetta against cable companies."""

Since when is it a crime, or even a consideration, to benefit from a personal vendetta? Conspiracy to commit a crime is only when you're actually doing something, not just sitting there thinking hateful thoughts. His intangible benefit is heresay and even were he to admit it, again it isn't a crime.

He wasnt found guilty of thought crime, but wire fraud. I was simply curious about his motivation.

So we hate the cable companies. Why not just drop the service? I dumped my cable tv and put an antenna up. I have basic phone service and only use the cable company for internet now. The only reason I stay is they simply offer the fastest speeds possible. There are options, such as UVerse/satellite/DSL. But here's the question. If the prices are outrageous, the service sucks, than that sounds to me like a huge business opportunity. Start your own ISP corp. Can't? Too expensive? Ok, fair enough. But then, why doesn't SOMEONE do this if it's such a great opportunity? Clearly, almost everyone hates their cable company so someone with the money should step up and say I'm going to take over this market. The fact that someone is NOT doing this should tell you something. As sucky as the companies seem to us, maybe no one else could do something a lot better for less money.

Well someone IS doing it - isn't there an ISP in California that was recently reviewed on Ars (forget their name as I am in Virginia )) that offers something like 100Mbps fiber to the home at reasonable prices and has fantastic customer service? I believe the comments for that article had a few commenters affirming how awesome the service and support were. . .

So we hate the cable companies. Why not just drop the service? I dumped my cable tv and put an antenna up. I have basic phone service and only use the cable company for internet now. The only reason I stay is they simply offer the fastest speeds possible. There are options, such as UVerse/satellite/DSL. But here's the question. If the prices are outrageous, the service sucks, than that sounds to me like a huge business opportunity. Start your own ISP corp. Can't? Too expensive? Ok, fair enough. But then, why doesn't SOMEONE do this if it's such a great opportunity? Clearly, almost everyone hates their cable company so someone with the money should step up and say I'm going to take over this market. The fact that someone is NOT doing this should tell you something. As sucky as the companies seem to us, maybe no one else could do something a lot better for less money.

Well someone IS doing it - isn't there an ISP in California that was recently reviewed on Ars (forget their name as I am in Virginia )) that offers something like 100Mbps fiber to the home at reasonable prices and has fantastic customer service? I believe the comments for that article had a few commenters affirming how awesome the service and support were. . .

You have to love Nate's absurd rhetorical question about "the real bad guys—the white-collar geniuses who helped flush our collective economy down the toilet—so often avoid jail and even prosecution altogether?" Actually Nate, 'real bad guys' like Bernie Madoff do get prosecuted and are spending years in prison. Criminal theft, whether it's small, large, blue collar or white is wrong, and you sound like a 6 year old trying to rationalize wrong behavior by claiming somebody else did wrong too and nothing happened to them.

You have to love Nate's absurd rhetorical question about "the real bad guys—the white-collar geniuses who helped flush our collective economy down the toilet—so often avoid jail and even prosecution altogether?" Actually Nate, 'real bad guys' like Bernie Madoff do get prosecuted and are spending years in prison. Criminal theft, whether it's small, large, blue collar or white is wrong, and you sound like a 6 year old trying to rationalize wrong behavior by claiming somebody else did wrong too and nothing happened to them.

I am staggered to imagine how willfully blind you are to the obvious truth. When the biggest fraudsters in history can get bailed out at public expense, and carry on to raise their own wages in celebration, all while destroying many national economies and facing no prosecution, then criminality as defined by law no longer reflects the truth of criminality.

Real bad guys have too much money to face prosecution, unless their crimes are extremely flagrant and obvious, and then the odd one of them gets burnt on a stake to provide cover for the rest, like Madoff. What should be called criminal theft has been criminally diluted by the big money boys, by buying out our governments over decades of lobbying, corruption and regulatory drift.

I would agree that it was lame of Nate to suggest that one wrong might somehow negate another, if it were actually a matter of principle here. But the reality has always been a matter of allotting enforcement budgets to where they are most needed. It is absurd to witness trillion dollar crime sprees go rewarded while the pettiest crooks receive attention. If our governments still actually represented the public interest, then two bit hacks like this guy would be the least of our concerns.

I am staggered to imagine how willfully blind you are to the obvious truth. When the biggest fraudsters in history can get bailed out at public expense, and carry on to raise their own wages in celebration, all while destroying many national economies and facing no prosecution, then criminality as defined by law no longer reflects the truth of criminality.

Real bad guys have too much money to face prosecution, unless their crimes are extremely flagrant and obvious, and then the odd one of them gets burnt on a stake to provide cover for the rest, like Madoff. What should be called criminal theft has been criminally diluted by the big money boys, by buying out our governments over decades of lobbying, corruption and regulatory drift.

I would agree that it was lame of Nate to suggest that one wrong might somehow negate another, if it were actually a matter of principle here. But the reality has always been a matter of allotting enforcement budgets to where they are most needed. It is absurd to witness trillion dollar crime sprees go rewarded while the pettiest crooks receive attention. If our governments still actually represented the public interest, then two bit hacks like this guy would be the least of our concerns.

Hmmm, yes Obi One, the cynicism is strong in this one. I think that when cause and effect (aka crime and punishment) don't happen side by side people think there is no justice in the world. However punishment happens at it's own pace, and in it's own means. For example all these "robber barons" people are despairing so, could come down with an incurable illness. Watch as loves ones suffer and die, while they're spared to watch. Many forms. A week, a day, a decade? And the thing about "justice" is that it spares no one, rich or "two bit hacks".

If gun sellers aren't responsible for the crimes of their customers, why should this guy? I suspect it's because of the gun lobby being more powerful than the hacking lobby.

Also, if you're paying a modem rental fee you're being screwed. Charter had a $7 rental fee/month... I went on Amazon, bought a Motorola modem for $50 and 'paid it off' in 7 months. The less money I have to give to Charter for my internet, the better.

Interesting.The world time clocks had been reset by 1 second due to the earths change in rotation. Being that each and every - including electronic bit has/had to reset,this would involve creating a certain amount of 'entropy' for each device. And every observer of that reset,including bodies in space. Would have to account for that entropy is some way. Im not saying that reseting the clock has an effect,but the entropy has to go some where. Thus with every human being having the respective record of that experience. Included in observation of these 'devices'- the energy instead of going 'up hill',would go to a different proportion. Thus the experience would tend to conduct a 'read'wether or not the observer was aware of it.Since the 'switch',is the entropy itself. No longer included in past observation .

Problem being to go into this with some tactical decision making process. On a proportion of deductive reasoning. Or to vy for knowledge of the effect by making a 'recording',or this 'read'. Therefore incuring greater entropy. Would need certain stadum for this .

Sells an instruction set for how to put the lid,and switch on a shoe box with a pen hole in it . Viewing an eclipse.

The string is out there,if you look if you shake the string the waves become different,but more energy is necesary to straighten that string back. Anologous to the previous experience.Your in space,your not going to change the experience you know. Who has the energy,or what (stadum) to create the 'read of this'.

Its time we turn this idea of the "internet" on its head and create an "outernet": an ipv6 based, peer routed network where all a user has to do is put up an antenna to join. All traffic routes through nearest neighbors or, through packet encapsulation over legacy ipv4 routes until deployment saturation is achieved. It would be slow at first but it would be OURS. No pesky corporate owned proprietary routing infrastructure to mess with! And it turns the idea of LAN nodes isolated from the WAN by firewalls exactly on its head: a network of TOTAL CONNECTIVITY with direct routes to all neighboring nodes as the fundamental networking paradigm, without neglecting to firewall critical services as needed. *THIS* is the future of the internet.

There are a few mesh network projects that are already approaching this idea as well, such as The Free Network Foundation, and Peerpoint. I've written more or less a whitepaper on the subject in this thread http://freenetworkfoundation.org/?page_ ... -outernet/ but I am hardly the first or the only one to suggest this as a critical structural and technological upgrade to preserve a free and open internet.

Also, FWIW, for those looking for the status page on their cablemodems, many cablemodems have a status page at 192.168.100.1 . Most consumer routers will route from the LAN to that address no problem.

Actually your statement is fairly ridiculous as nowhere have I suggested using anything but standard fcc approved 802.11 radio hardware.

But were we to consider baby steps into other frequency allocations one need only look at all the various frequencies of operation offered by vendors like ubiquiti at http://www.ubnt.com and others to see how many devices are already fcc approved, available, deployed and operating on radio spectra besides 2.4 ghz and 5 ghz: 900mhz. 700mhz. 4.5ghz municipal. 3.5ghz ISM. 180mhz utility companies. 400mhz licensed bands from other vendors.

When people start updating the firmware en masse on preexisting hardware to support the ipv6 protocol stack with a few extensions, enhancements and conventions, there wont be any lawsuits and certainly not directed at me or any of the other myriad developers working hard to create feasible and workable mesh routed radio networking technology.

What there will be, is relief and celebration.

I was working on something like this a few years ago. For long point to point links we came up with a "shutter" to encode using a lazer. (concept since blue light lazers were very expensive back then) Since we have 802.11n dual mode now we don't need two sets of cards one in 5GHz for local, and next hop links. It was a fun project, it reminds me of the packet radio networks I read about before I got into university. Sadly not only will it be slow, it'll be finicky as well, and you'll almost never know why. Lots of things effect that frequency, least of which being the client radios themselves. The longest ranging of the avaliable bands also being the most utilized. What we need is something like wi-max for next hop links, and leave 5GHz for the security conscious.

Irony here is that this is how cable started to begin with. They connected a few good antennas up, and shared the black wire around the neighborhood. Now everyone wants to put up our own antennas again, and get off the black wire that is not really shared anymore. In some other nations they were doing this with cat5, and sharing it with the neighbors.

Hello Appleseed, you bring up some good points. Obviously long haul radio links tend to get better range at lower frequencies. I remember reading somewhere that Verizon's purchase of the 700mhz spectrum formerly used for UHF TV channels above 63 was to be for wimax. Not sure if you saw it or not but ubiquiti networking already has 802.11 products for 700 and 900 mhz intended for backhaul links (or for links that wish to employ security through obscurity) that claim some fairly extreme range: http://www.ubnt.com/xr7 and http://www.ubnt.com/xr9 .

Also, there used to be a few sites detailing novel, DIY line of sight optical communication methods. One that comes to mind is the Ronja project: http://ronja.twibright.com/ Another site, modulatedlight.org has a nice list of project pages and tests done by experimenters and hams: http://www.modulatedlight.org/optical_c ... index.html Not sure if any of these people have gotten past the 10 megabit link speed of Ronja, but Ronja only uses LED's and looks like it was last updated in 2009. Surely light should be able to beat radio waves in both speed and simplicity of hardware implementation.

In the early stages of implementation such a mesh network as the "outernet" will be slow. But the key idea is that it will be a community owned and maintained network where the users not only own, but ARE, the infrastructure. Hackerspaces could pick up the slack and maintain the longhauls. They could also serve as community centers for maintaining services like mesh DNS, which one presumes would be maintained by committee. A novel solution for DNS would be to copy the spirit of the usenet "Big 7" and "Alt" hierarchies and implement one community organized hierarchy and one "free for all" hierarchy, obviously reversing the LSB to MSB order to the MSB to LSB used in domain names.

Another solution to improve the robustness, resiliency and connectivity of the network in the absence of sufficient deployment density for the mesh to do it on its own, at least in the early stages would be to employ tunneling and simply utilize segments of the existing ipv4 internet to pick up the slack. This fits perfectly the definition of the internet as a "network of networks" when scaled up from the ipv4 address space to the ipv6 address space. With de-facto interoperability since ipv6 already includes ipv4 as a subnet.

Finally, addressing your last paragraph: A new "outernet" mesh network shouldn't be conceived of as being used only to replace ones existing ISP-maintained internet connection. Especially in the beginning, this would be designed to supplant ones ISP-maintained pipe. Probably only die hards, geeks and adventurers, people who enjoy staking out a claim in a rugged frontier would opt for mesh only, radio only implementations.

Due to things like tunneling, virtual interfaces and packet encapsulation, in the early stages of implementation many folks might not even bother with an antenna. Think of it this way: Windows already comes with ipv6 enabled by default in the form of the teredo interface: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teredo_tunneling . Teredo already enables full connectivity of legacy ipv4 hosts to the ipv6 address space. It would simply require strategic placement of teredo relays in mesh nodes enabled with physical radios. It might depend on the resource footprint of teredo but perhaps this function could be implemented by convention in *all* such radio enabled nodes.

You have to love Nate's absurd rhetorical question about "the real bad guys—the white-collar geniuses who helped flush our collective economy down the toilet—so often avoid jail and even prosecution altogether?" Actually Nate, 'real bad guys' like Bernie Madoff do get prosecuted and are spending years in prison. Criminal theft, whether it's small, large, blue collar or white is wrong, and you sound like a 6 year old trying to rationalize wrong behavior by claiming somebody else did wrong too and nothing happened to them.

You have to love Nate's absurd rhetorical question about "the real bad guys—the white-collar geniuses who helped flush our collective economy down the toilet—so often avoid jail and even prosecution altogether?" Actually Nate, 'real bad guys' like Bernie Madoff do get prosecuted and are spending years in prison. Criminal theft, whether it's small, large, blue collar or white is wrong, and you sound like a 6 year old trying to rationalize wrong behavior by claiming somebody else did wrong too and nothing happened to them.

I am staggered to imagine how willfully blind you are to the obvious truth. When the biggest fraudsters in history can get bailed out at public expense, and carry on to raise their own wages in celebration, all while destroying many national economies and facing no prosecution, then criminality as defined by law no longer reflects the truth of criminality.

Real bad guys have too much money to face prosecution, unless their crimes are extremely flagrant and obvious, and then the odd one of them gets burnt on a stake to provide cover for the rest, like Madoff. What should be called criminal theft has been criminally diluted by the big money boys, by buying out our governments over decades of lobbying, corruption and regulatory drift.

I would agree that it was lame of Nate to suggest that one wrong might somehow negate another, if it were actually a matter of principle here. But the reality has always been a matter of allotting enforcement budgets to where they are most needed. It is absurd to witness trillion dollar crime sprees go rewarded while the pettiest crooks receive attention. If our governments still actually represented the public interest, then two bit hacks like this guy would be the least of our concerns.

They could also serve as community centers for maintaining services like mesh DNS, which one presumes would be maintained by committee. A novel solution for DNS would be to copy the spirit of the usenet "Big 7" and "Alt" hierarchies and implement one community organized hierarchy and one "free for all" hierarchy, obviously reversing the LSB to MSB order to the MSB to LSB used in domain names.

I think building up a DNS-SD to remove the need for formal DNS service would be important. (note: dns-sd is not currently designed to work in this environment) I don't think implimenting something like this with ipv4 in mind is even worth discussion. It should use ipv6 from inception. Something radically new should break away from, and be willing to coopt existing technologies to broaden its innovation.

I always envisioned this to be like an IRC network. You put up a server, and someone wants to join your server, and become a network so you cross link your IRC servers. In the real Internet it's similar, two parites agree on a peering arrangment, and then they forward each other's traffic. The same for these long haul wireless points. You meet up, and agree on a peering arrangement.

Hmmm, yes Obi One, the cynicism is strong in this one. I think that when cause and effect (aka crime and punishment) don't happen side by side people think there is no justice in the world. However punishment happens at it's own pace, and in it's own means. For example all these "robber barons" people are despairing so, could come down with an incurable illness. Watch as loves ones suffer and die, while they're spared to watch. Many forms. A week, a day, a decade? And the thing about "justice" is that it spares no one, rich or "two bit hacks".

Look though I may, I cannot find any faith in some magic of justice creating itself. We live in a world where we must create for ourselves any justice we dare hope to enjoy. Creating justice is as close to a sacred duty for those able to grasp the true need of it, as I am able to imagine. And to this duty we have long invested vast effort, but seem now to have come to a sorry state where all those efforts have become twisted into a sick and destructive parody of what was truly intended and needed for the good of the people. What is worse, we came to this travesty by deliberate sabotage.

In the long view, I hope we will realize that excessive concentrations of wealth and/or power, in any and every form, are humanity's greatest enemy, the threat that overwhelms and destroys from within. It has been a fiendishly cultivated blindness to this enemy that has allowed us to stare in idle puzzlement as our societies have become perverted into engines of irrational profit, while our justice and humanity are twisted to destructive and naught-but-greed serving ends. Excessive wealth and power; we must learn that these are never to be tolerated, let alone celebrated. The undoing of this disparity will most likely come in one of two forms: Either we will see unbidden calamity and immense destruction and suffering, because the nonsense we have allowed to rule us is unsustainable; Or hopefully, the larger public will realize their dire need, their sacred duty, their deep obligation, to stand up and enforce justice, all of us, for without this effort all may be lost (please remember that extinction is now become one of our imminently plausible options). Justice does not come magically. It can only be had where and when it is made real by you and me. We must realize this imperative and rise to it.

In a better, kinder, and just world, where robber barons did not write the laws to suite their own whim and fancy, and where cable companies and other "service providers" did not thus prey freely upon the public, I would be glad to see order maintained even for the petty hack who stars in this article. His petty crime would be worthy of our enforcement efforts, and would have no possible element of justification, only an obvious degree of threat to public security at large. But in the world as it actually stands, I see the sorry anti-ethic of dog eat dog has become the new rule of economic life. Our petty hack is simply participating as best he can in like spirit, finding a niche where he may, albeit unshielded for lack of enough heft to write some rules in his own favor. He steals only from fellow opportunists and thieves, a pup amongst a pack of wolves feeding on the smallest scraps, and now being nipped aside for daring to take a nibble amongst those stronger than himself. This is no longer a matter of ethics, it is merely a feeding frenzy. And if our public investment in enforcement were to be well spent, we should thin the wolves first, and tame the pups as gently as possible afterwards.

Despite the nature of his business, Harris was concerned about the piracy of his software. A 2006 version of his site warned that "all of the software found on this page is property of TCNiSO, INC" and said that it could not "be distributed or linked to, without the written consent of TCNiSO."

There's a touch of irony here.

Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.

I don't totally understand this sentiment to be honest. He sold cable modems with his custom firmware, tools to load firmware onto cable modems, and tools to change the mac addresses of cable modems. Other (now defunct) forums stole his programs and sometimes re-branded them to their own "hacker" groups and then taught script kiddies how to steal internet service. The things he is accused of resulted from the information he was able to accumulate based on his understand and research of docsis, cable modems, and their engineering. His forums were always heavily moderated, while other websites specifically had topics dedicated to illegal activity using his tools. Those people talked often and openly about being banned from DerEngle's site, and how amusing they thought it was. In my mind, those are the people who should have been targeted by the FBI.

He was the primary facillator, thats why they went after him.

No matter how you gained the knowleged or who else exploited it for their own use, if you provide materials or information or items knowingly or intentionally to commit, or for the comission of, or enable capability for those things to be used to commit, some offense, you are a primary facilitator and can be charged and tried as commiting an offense (usually for what you actually did if its not a capitol crime) even if not directly involved in the execution of the offense.

He was clearly a primary facillitator. He had a forum and web site about and for it expressly set up to distribute and talk about his stuff, he knew what people were using it for and they were even posting about it, he provided the items needed, he even said his motive was revenge. There you go, means, opportunity, motive, capability. If it had not been for the interstate aspect, this probably would have been some sort of civil action bought by a cable company, or possibly some sort of low class felony or even a misdemeanor charge at a local or state level. Had it not been for the interstate aspect the FBI probably would not have gotten involved. and there probably would have been no federal charges The others who used his stuff, if they did so in their own states at their cable modems and not interstate the FBI would not get involved with that unelss it did go interstate.

Harris got 36 months in jail, a $50,000 fine, and $152,000 in restitution to Charter. If he had a good lawyer (so don't start hailing his public defender as a hero yet), I can see maybe 18 months or less (of which he would probably only spend a few with the rest on some sort of community service), a $10,000 fine, and $152,000 in restitution to Charter. The judge evidently took into account the overall actual serousness and sentenced within guidelines.

Allowing companies to monopolize huge segments of the internet seeking population is no different than allowing power companies to buy out cooperatives and phone companies to control access to phone services. Such monopolies follow John D Rockefeller's adage that "Competition is a sin". Hacking such imperial systems is the only form of competition they face. Our government has become a brothel of prostitutes pandering to the "campaign" dollar (read bribes). And as anyone can tell you if you take a million dollars you are going to OWE someone. What happens today in our political arena would have been held in contempt 20 years ago....would even have garnered the recipients jail terms. The only way to stand up to such corporate and governmental abuses is to fight the good fight. We have entered an era where corporate dollars control government, even to the point of ignoring the Constitution, and the only recourse besides bloody revolution is civil disobedience. We have a social obligation to stand up to such arrogant disregard for the liberties of the American citizen and the globalization of law. The very fact that people are punished arbitrarily and disproportionately today for crimes of theft where the victim has not been deprived of a possession and the perpetrator has not forced entry or threatened violence and the victim is not even expected to support the claim of lost revenue is heinous. People are being prosecuted because corporations realize this is a source of profit in an otherwise shaky economy. While entertainment moguls whine that shareware sites deprive them of profits without any regard for the fact that 20 million Americans are out of work because our government creates 'free trade' zones with third world countries that produce NOTHING but cheap labor and cannot afford what few products America still produces. They are then allowed to dump their products on a now unprotected American market forcing other companies to fold or locate overseas. We are told this is due to over regulation, regulations like safety and environmental concerns when the truth is that Americans cannot survive on third world wages (think $60 US Haitian garment worker). And all the while laws are drawn up to further assault the dwindling American dollar and ensure a populace of involuntary indentured slaves. What crime is committed when a person downloads a movie from a torrent site? A movie he might not have paid to see anyway or bought on dvd that in a few months will be offered on several cable stations? Is it a crime worth millions in retaliation? Or is it merely greed recognizing a source of profit in a flagging economy?